


A Matter of Circumstances

by Face_of_Poe



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Because I am not a complete asshole, Brock Rumlow being a dick, Bucky finding himself, Bucky's kind of an asshole at times though, Gen, Natasha keeping secrets, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), definitely some angst, fair warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-26 20:31:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6254827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Face_of_Poe/pseuds/Face_of_Poe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"If you want information on who you are, just go to Steve. Believe me, it would be his pleasu - <i>oomph</i>,” she cuts off with a grunt as she’s hauled to her feet and slammed into a tree. </p>
<p>“<i>Not</i> him,” he whispers harsh in her face. “I’ve been to the museum, I know about his… his<i> Bucky</i>. The friend, the fallen, the <i>hero</i>. I want what came <i>after</i>.”</p>
<p>She studies him a moment, unconcerned with the forearm pressing against her sternum. “Not a pleasant road you’re looking to travel.” </p>
<p>“Wasn’t really counting on a happy ending, sweetheart.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

> So this went from 'oh, here's a fun one-shot idea' to 'oh, maybe we'll make this a 2-3 parter' to 'what the hell, let's include a bit of PLOT,' so now it's 5 parts and just about complete, so the idea is just to post a chapter a night this week, barring any unforeseen circumstances (probably involving a toddler). 
> 
>  
> 
> Part one starts off a few months before Age of Ultron, part two is a few months after. 
> 
> Think that about covers it. Enjoy!

Metal fingers tighten incrementally along the forearm of the rifle and he lets out a slow, steadying breath as the familiar blond head lines up in his scope. Underneath it is the more subdued uniform in blue and silver instead of the star-spangled eyesore, but Rogers has lost or foregone the helmet.

The shield stands out like a fucking target against the snowy landscape anyway, and it’s tempting to put an ineffectual round into the center of the star-shaped bullseye, just to make a goddamn point.

There’s a whisper of movement behind him, and then a leg is wrapping around his torso, a knee pressed hard into his metal left shoulder, short limbs on a deceptively strong, narrow frame. The bite of a garrote wire against his neck threatens to pull his focus from the scope, but another deep breath keeps his attention forward and down the hill from his makeshift nest and he adjusts his aim marginally as a low voice murmurs hot against his ear.

“Captain America, your last target; I wonder, is he the _only_ mission you’ve ever failed?”

He grits his teeth and fires off a round. A slumping body and a spray of red across the snow confirm the kill.

“There was another,” he admits, voice hoarse from disuse. “A long time ago.”

Rogers affords himself a moment of distraction to peer up the hill and sketch a salute, acknowledging the shot. The non-metal fist clenches reflexively, and the mouth up against his ear turns away slightly, the wire disappears from his neck, and he hears a low acknowledgement. “No problem, Cap. All clear.”

He whirls and slams the figure down into the snow with his metal hand fisted in her jacket. Red hair is tucked under a white hat, but he doesn’t need it to recognize her increasingly-familiar face that just peers up at him unimpressed.

Instead of fighting back, a dry half-smile twists her lips, brows cocked in calculating curiosity. “So you _did_ pull him out of the river. He insisted you had; the rest of us called it wishful thinking, figured he retained consciousness long enough to drag himself to shore.” Her expression twists further, into something mocking, almost cruel. “But I guess he did have a lot of holes in him at the time.”

A derisive snort escapes him and he releases his grip, rolling over onto his back and sitting up to reach his rifle and begin breaking it down. “You had the shot; why didn’t you kill me in Kaliningrad?”

“You kidding?” Sitting up and crossing one leg over the other in a posture that maybe would be relaxed somewhere besides a snow-covered slope outside a dilapidated HYDRA base, she watches him work with sharp eyes but sans commentary on the impressive arsenal he packs. “You provide the cover and I get the credit, why would I pass that up?” She pauses, then adds seriously. “Whoever… _whatever_ you are… it would devastate Steve. You must know he’s been looking for you.”

“Capture, then,” he amends irritably.

“I don’t flatter myself.”

He recalls their furious fight in the streets of D.C in scattered snapshots, that final memory wipe breaking down without time in cryo to fortify it. Her ingenuity had nearly been the match of his firepower, but he’d have had her, were it not for Rogers’ timely intervention. “You shot me,” he frowns, not sure if he means it as rebuke or compliment.

Her grin suggests easily enough how she takes it. “You shot me first.” His brow furrows slightly. “Odessa?” she prompts, hand drifting absently down to her lower midriff, and he shrugs. “You don’t remember?”

“Remembering was never part of the protocol.”

“I- yeah,” she nods slowly. “I read your file. I just thought…”

She trails off as his hand spasms, like he’s forcibly fighting down the urge to seize her again, knock her back to the ground, demand what he wants and acquire it through any means necessary…

Deep breath. Mild tone. “I haven’t. It wasn’t part of the information dump.”

Tongue darting out to nervously lick cold, chapped lips is the only betrayal of her apprehension at his shift in temperament. “No. I had to get creative. Can’t have a ghost story if there’s too much proof out there that the ghost is real.” Her gaze shifts back down to where his spasming hand has clenched into a tight fist. “Is… is that what you were doing in Kaliningrad? Before you threw in with our lot?”

“I didn’t throw in with your lot, and I don’t give a damn about your missing alien spear.”

“Scepter,” she corrects wryly. “Then why follow us here?”

“Because I’m starved for leads and no one’s yet told Rogers that the paint job on that damn shield of his was the dumbest tactical decision of the twentieth century.”

“Right after getting involved in a land war in Asia?” He blinks; she shakes her head. “Never mind. If you want information on who you are, just go to Steve. Believe me, it would be his pleasu - _oomph_ ,” she cuts off with a grunt as she’s hauled to her feet and slammed into a tree.

“ _Not_ him,” he whispers harsh in her face. “I’ve been to the museum, I know about his… his _Bucky_. The friend, the fallen, the _hero_. I want what came _after_.”

She studies him a moment, unconcerned with the forearm pressing against her sternum. “Not a pleasant road you’re looking to travel.”

“Wasn’t really counting on a happy ending, sweetheart.”

He releases her with a huff and half-turns, running a hand through his matted hair, but she doesn’t move for several seconds, watching him, head tilted slightly to one side, discerning. “How about a trade?”

He turns back sharply. “I’m not coming in.”

She waves him off. “I’ll get you a copy of the file. All the gritty details. You point us towards our scepter.”

After a moment of consideration, looking for the catch: “Why?”

“Oh, come on,” she rolls her eyes. “At best, you’re a lost loose-cannon having an identity crisis; at worst, an assassin with no resources, whose former handlers would probably like to see him dead more than any potential enemies. I don’t give a damn what hellish rabbit hole you want to crawl down into your past, and quite frankly, you’re irrelevant next to the potential the scepter carries for chaos and destruction.”

He mulls that over a moment. “And you won’t tell Rogers?”

“His head needs to be in the game right now, not 1944.” She smiles tightly at him. “You’re bad for business, Barnes.”

Letting the discomfort at being addressed by a name he doesn’t particularly recall being _his_ pass by, he finds the decision easy enough, in the end. He has literally nothing to lose but his own farce of a life, lost in the world since turning his back on the people he was _programmed_ to serve at the behest of a flag-draped man he can only recall with the foggy sense of a dream slipping through his fingers, falling faster and faster the harder he reaches for it.

He’d entertain the fantasy of grasping those memories at last and clinging to them as ferociously as every other scrap of information he can recall since the last brain wipe, if he weren’t so sure he’d never live long enough to do anything about it.

“There are whispers,” he tells her, “if you know how to listen. Something new, something… unnatural.”

“Do those whispers come with a name and address?”

“Wolfgang von Strucker.”

She nods grimly, unsurprised. “I know Baron Strucker.” It occurs that this was at least partially a test of his good faith and intentions.

“Give me a week and I’ll point you in the right direction.”

“Provided you’ve got your file.”

“There is that,” he acknowledges unashamedly, slinging his pack onto his back.

As if on cue, she tips her head to the side, listening to her earpiece, and then touches it lightly with a finger to turn the mic back on. “Yeah… uh-huh. Copy. Roger, Rogers.” He’s already weaving through the trees when she turns back and calls after him, “How do I find you?”

He doesn’t turn. “You don’t; one week, Romanoff.” 

He’s two kilometers away when the compound goes up in an impressive series of explosions. He only pauses at the sound of the Quinjet rising above the terrain, and turns to watch it streak off towards the west, silhouetted in the setting sun.

 

X---X

 

Eight days later, undercover at a swanky state dinner in Marseille as a favor to Fury, Natasha takes her seat and smiles charmingly across the table at the chief financier of the remaining HYDRA operations in Europe. Under the guise of unfolding her napkin into her lap, she swipes the brochure tucked beneath her plate, hiding it under her thigh until a moment comes that she can peer quickly down at the Cyrillic letters.

_Visit Beautiful Sokovia_

When she returns to her opulent hotel suite three hours later, pamphlet folded and tucked into the band of her thigh holster beneath her dress, there is no sign of a forced entry but she already knows what she’ll find.

Leaping nimbly down from the bathroom counter after reconnecting the fan and replacing the vent cover, she thumbs open Barnes’ file folder and finds that the contents have been replaced by a single sheet of plain paper with a scrawl of numbers in two rows. Coordinates. Not expecting anything else, she’s surprised when she flips the page over to reveal another line of hastily scribbled writing.

_You’re going to want a bigger team._  

Explaining their sudden new lead pointing them to a facility in a country most of them couldn’t even place on a map would take some careful consideration but, when Fury calls her three days later and pulls her out of an initial brainstorming session with Steve and Tony to inform her of their Marseillais financier’s sudden, tragic death in a freak accident aboard his yacht and apologizing for the waste of her time, she decides that it’s worth the trouble.

 

X---X

 

Clint’s probably the least recognizable of the team, and she’s the best adept at disguises, so six weeks later they take Barnes’ advice, however tongue-in-cheek, and visit beautiful Sokovia – reconnaissance in the form of a honeymoon package at a resort in the mountains south of the capital city where Barnes claims HYDRA is operating in plain sight. Not that they shouldn’t have every confidence in doing so, given how very nearly they’d come to bringing the world to heel from within the ranks of S.H.I.E.L.D. itself.

They dropped by to visit Clint’s family before leaving the country, and having his pregnant wife and their two children send them off on their ‘honeymoon’ would never not be just a little bit weird.

She almost doesn’t recognize him, and spares a moment to wonder if she’s slipping or he’s just that good at blending in, given the proper circumstances. Crowded market in a tourist trap, cold enough to justify a thick enough coat to hide the extra bulk of his metal limb… only the intensity of his stare and distinctive length of his hair make him apparent as he observes them from a table outside a café, pretending to sip idly at a coffee.

Biding her time, she and Clint take a lap around the town square, stopping for pictures and feeding one another snacks purchased from wheeled carts and ducking into overpriced souvenir shops so he can ask for help deciding on gifts for his ‘sister and her family,’ and she offers honest advice on what she thinks Laura and the kids would like.

Once they’ve made enough of a show of being nauseatingly love-struck and on vacation, she suggests that he return his shopping finds to their room and arrange for a car so they might spend the evening exploring the capital, where Strucker’s base is purportedly located.

Natasha meanders her way a bit outside the square and follows signs towards a church claimed to be the oldest standing in Sokovia. Times for daily services are advertised, as well as organized tours; a glance at her watch assures her it is currently in between either, and she ducks inside and sits in a pew towards the back. A half dozen people are scattered about the quiet space, heads bowed, praying, reflecting, perhaps just resting their legs.

She’s just starting to get antsy about making it back to the square in time to avoid awkward questions from Clint when she senses the approach of a figure moving surprisingly quietly for his size and build. He slides onto the bench by her side just as a group ends its tour, stepping through a door in a front corner of the room and shattering the calm stillness while families account for their children and belongings, some sitting to peruse brochures and maps while most of the room’s prior occupants stand to leave.

And in the sudden noise and commotion, a low voice murmurs for her ears alone, “You’ve a sense of humor to match your moniker.”

“I once poisoned a priest during mass, there’s only so much a person can be damned.”

A beat passes. “Did he deserve it?”

“Questions like that are why HYDRA’s idea of a perfect assassin was one with dozens of impossible kills he couldn’t even remember.” She holds, tensing for a reaction, but hooded eyes just stare forward under a curtain of dark hair. “How did you find your reading?”

“It was…” he trails away, goes quiet for a long minute until she turns to look at him, catching a brief glimpse of haunted eyes before he shifts and closes off again. “It was less than satisfying.”

“Because it told you what you are, but the question you really want answered is what you’ve _done_.” His silence is affirming enough, and her tone turns to a harsh whisper. “Your file was a glorified how-to manual, for the next time HYDRA wanted an upgrade. You’re not going to find a resume out there somewhere, there is no _written list_ of your sins. You’re best off confessing the ones you remember, and being grateful for the ones you don’t.”

“Is that why you brought me to church?” He shoots her a mischievous grin with a gleam in his eye that rocks her straight back to old photos of Steve’s and footage from the Smithsonian exhibit.

The effect disappears so quick she wonders if she might’ve imagined it. “So what now? I hadn’t counted on seeing your face again, after that sleight in Marseille. You’re… unnervingly good at what you do.”

His eyes search her face, brow furrowed deeply. “So were you, once. You left.”

“Didn’t you?”

“I had nowhere left to go, it isn’t the same thing.”

“If that were true, you wouldn’t have saved Steve from drowning. If that were true, you could turn yourself over to Strucker tomorrow and be re-primed to fight when we take him on.”

His gloved metal fist tenses, but he slumps slightly, shoulders hunched in defeat. “I don’t want to fight you.”

“But ignorance is bliss, and there’s a certain appeal to the idea of forcibly forgetting everything you’ve learned since D.C.” Part of her wants to probe further, ask if the file and any further research he’s managed into the online data dump have prompted his memories, either of his time as HYDRA’s fist or his time as the Bucky Barnes who Steve knew and loved growing up and in the war; she refrains, for fear of alienating him irrevocably. “There’s no balancing the ledger for people like you and me,” she confesses softly. “I once thought…” a bitter laugh escapes her. “Even the years I thought I was chipping away at the red in my book, I may as well have been working for HYDRA. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s dead, and I don’t know if the Avengers are going to be enough, when the next catastrophe strikes.” 

He shoots her a sly sidelong glance. “And so you keep a secret which would shatter Rogers’ faith in you for fear that if you _don’t_ , your team will dissolve that much sooner.”

“On balance, it was the right decision.”

“Because you think I killed Stark’s parents.”

His tone betrays nothing, and she can’t stop the question from slipping out. “Did you?”

He just shrugs. “Couldn’t tell you.” She assumes from his blasé demeanor that, if there _is_ anything he remembers, working with Howard Stark during the war is not included. “And what will you do when you’ve reacquired your _scepter_ , or when Rogers and his very tenacious friend finally run me to ground?”

“Provided you’re still in your right mind? Whatever you want me to do.”

“Why?”

“Because I read the damn file, okay? After seventy years, someone owes you some semblance of free will.”

That sly look returns. “Even with my ledger so very out of balance?”

“Getting tossed in a top-secret CIA detention center to be poked and prodded and _evaluated_ certainly won’t help anything.” She runs a frustrated hand through her hair and then checks the time. Clint will be returning soon with a car. “Steve means well, but he hasn’t thought it through. He thinks that _bringing you in_ means going back to another life, when you were different people, just picking up back in Brooklyn where you left off in the 1940s. But the truth is, the intelligence community knows the ghost story was real – HYDRA put all their eggs in one basket with Project Insight and sending you against Steve. The opinions are still split on whether you died with the helicarriers. But the only place Steve could hope to bring you in and keep you off the radar of any interested parties is Stark’s fortress in Manhattan, and deep down he _knows_ that’d be problematic in its own right, or he’d have told the rest of the team who exactly you are.”

“And who is that?”

Her reply is blunt. “His tortured and brainwashed best friend. And even if you don’t remember that, fighting him on the helicarrier should be ample proof that he will never, _ever_ let you go, now that he knows you’re out there.”

He turns to fully face her, eyes flickering quickly back and forth, light frown ghosting across his lips. “I shot him.”

“Yeah.”

“I shot him and he came back for me.”

“He loves you.”

“I don’t know him.” His eyes squeeze shut and a hand fists into the fabric of his coat. “That’s not… it’s in there. _He’s_ in there. I just can’t…” Tortured eyes open and meet hers desperately. “I don’t know what to _do_.”

She’s getting emotional whiplash from his mood swings, but just asks calmly, “What do you want to do?”

There’s very real fear behind the determination in his eyes when he says, “I want to go back to where it started.”

At first, she thinks he means home – Brooklyn. But this isn’t Bucky Barnes sitting before her – not yet, anyway. “The train.”

“Can you make sure his friend – Wilson, with the wings – looks the other way for a few days?”

“Yeah,” she agrees after a moment’s pause, mouth suddenly dry. “I can do that.” Another reminder about the depressing nature of the dark road he plans to travel would simply fall on deaf ears, but she’s surprised to find something akin to grief welling deep inside her on his behalf. It’s probably a good thing that her phone buzzes with a message from Clint, wondering where she’s run off to, before she threatens to turn sentimental on the wayward man before her. “I have to go.”

“If there’s anything…” he starts awkwardly, then frowns down at the floor and tries again. “If there’s anything you need of me, in exchange for your assistance – another trade?”

It’s on the tip of her tongue to tell him just to watch after himself, but something else slips out. “Yeah – get a haircut. S’too distinctive long.”

His bark of laughter surprises her. “Sure, trusting a stranger at my back with a pair of scissors next to my jugular – you _are_ funny, Widow.”


	2. Part II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For some reason, I had always sort of assumed that Rumlow's survival wasn't widely known. Not really sure why, in retrospect, since we saw him at the end of CA:TWS. Perusing his wiki page has made me realize that this may not be the case, but that's where this chapter approaches it from.

Natasha confesses to Steve, after a long day breaking in the new team and over a couple glasses of wine, that she’d been prepared to run away with Bruce, disappear indefinitely, without a word.

It’d have been easier if he’d shown any sign of being angry or even hurt by the thought. But Steve’s still reeling from the team crumbling under the weight of its secrets, turning on one another in Tony’s lab and how that might have ended without Thor’s timely arrival and intervention, and the idea that Natasha was willing to throw the rest of it away for a love she never thought she’d have earns nothing but heartfelt compassion from him.

He’s been making trips more and more frequently down to D.C. to visit with Peggy Carter, and that knowledge does nothing to temper the sharp ache of guilt his sympathy flares within her. Tony and Bruce with their _murderbots_ , Thor and his world-ending gemstones, Clint’s family hideaway, and Steve’s so damn _understanding_ of her secret, because he can put himself in her shoes, desperately wanting the impossible.

She regrets so much of it, can’t help but lay awake at night postulating how any of it might have gone differently had she told Steve about Barnes following them out of Kaliningrad, having their backs outside Donetsk, handing them Strucker with all the best intentions, even if they’d blown the op in spectacular fashion in the long run.

If they were just going to fall apart anyway, was it worth denying Steve this thing he wanted most? This thing that, some days, she believes to be the only thing keeping him going since the collapse of S.H.I.E.L.D., the hope that one day he’ll have Bucky back, a missing piece of his past to make this strange and terrible future more bearable.

Even if she wanted to betray the confidence Barnes had placed in her, betray the word she had given him, it would only cause useless, bitter resentment. Three months have passed since he declared his intentions of journeying to that harrowing pass where Bucky Barnes died and something terrible was born in his place, and there is no way of knowing where he might be now, whether he would pop back up in due course or stay hidden in the shadows, away from Steve and Sam’s increasingly pessimistic searches.

But when Fury passes along details to Maria Hill about a newly discovered and recently destroyed HYDRA base buried deep in the Austrian Alps, she knows that Barnes has been keeping busy, suspects that his memory is returning piecemeal. The pictures surely don’t do it justice, but the devastation wrought on what are barely recognizable scientific and medical labs speaks to a deep sense of rage and despair, not the effective and clinical work of the _Asset_. 

The report suggests that by all appearances, the base had been long out of commission before its destruction. There are no bodies, no signs of a fight, and the only blood found is that smeared around the shattered glass window of a cryo freeze capsule.

 

X---X

 

The events in and over Sokovia have made Fury’s survival known in the intelligence community and, soon thereafter, assorted Congressional oversight and subcommittees the likes of which dragged Natasha through excruciatingly long days of rehashing her past laid bare in the files she’d dumped on the internet. Coupled with the Avengers very nearly contributing to global extinction via metal army led by the world’s first known honest-to-God artificial intelligence, there’s a certain amount of damage control to be done.

Fury and Hill don’t so much ask as tell Steve and Rhodey that their presences are going to be needed at a series of hearings and conferences in D.C. as the most PR-positive of the new Avengers team. Wanda and Vision are out of the question, and Natasha pissed enough of these people off in the days of the HYDRA fallout. There’s brief talk of Sam joining, until Rhodey awkwardly points out that the military is still _pissed_ about the theft of the classified Falcon wing tech from Fort Meade, and he’s liable to find himself as the subject of a few subcommittee hearings of his own if he gets too involved.

Rumor has it that Tony’s presence has also been not-so-politely requested; him actually showing up is _not_ a wager on which she’d place her money, even with Rhodey’s pull. His scars run deeper in some ways, guilt for overreaching on the Ultron project in the first place, a sense of responsibility for Bruce’s disappearance, the same horror she knows Steve feels at how easily they’d come to blows. He still funds most of the operations at the new facility upstate, but has mostly delegated any actual dealings with the team to Pepper, who confessed to Natasha on her last visit that she’s worried about Tony, that he’s buried himself in some new project he won’t talk about, distracted yet obsessive in a manner she hasn’t seen since his anxiety in the months after Loki’s attack on New York.

Making a public appearance might be bad for their purposes, but Natasha tags along with Steve and Rhodey anyway and does what she’s always done best – watches and listens, and picks apart more truths from that which remains _unspoken_.

Rhodey still has a place in Arlington, but Natasha and Steve take Sam up on his offer to crash at the townhouse he hasn’t yet decided what to do with, where they hid out from Pierce and the other HYDRA elements that infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D. at the highest levels. At the end of their first day in the city, tension is radiating off of Steve palpably, and they sit up late talking and eating Chinese straight out of take-out cartons, passing them back and forth with no regard to what either of them actually ordered in the first place.

There’s almost a normalcy to the night, like they’ve gone back before the mission aboard the _Lemurian Star_ that changed everything. Simpler days, in their own way, if not exactly happier.

The bout of nostalgia lasts as long as Steve bidding her a good night at the base of the stairs, retreating to the spare room on the ground floor and letting her take the more comfortable master upstairs with a final, “Don’t use up all the hot water in the morning,” that makes her smile tightly, thinking of the team crowded into the Barton family homestead.

Once upstairs, she pushes open the bedroom door, flings her duffel onto the bed, flips on the overhead light, and follows through on the motion by whipping out the small pistol tucked into her waistband with the same ingrained training that somehow, miraculously, has kept her from vocalizing her sudden shock with anything more than a sharp inhale.

For his part, Barnes doesn’t move from the corner of the room shielded from sight from the hallway by the open door, where he’s pulled the chair away from empty desk under the window. He just watches patiently, stoically, as her eyes sweep about the room and up and down his form before tucking the gun away again and running a hand wearily across her face.

And as she closes the door quietly behind her, she can’t stop herself from asking, “What the _fuck_?” The corner of his mouth turns up almost imperceptibly. “You know Steve’s staying here, too? What if you’d picked the wrong room?”

“He’s a gentlemen, of course he’d insist you have the master.”

“Well what if he’d come up here?”

His brow furrows. “Why should he?”

She opens her mouth, closes it, opens it again, and then grins lopsidedly at his confusion, realizing what could be inferred from the suggestion. “Would that make you jealous?”

It’s quiet for a long stretch, his frown deepening, and she’s just wondering if she’s either pissed him off or he simply doesn’t understand when he counters, “Jealous of which one of you?” and she laughs incredulously.

“Touché, I suppose.” He still hasn’t moved from the chair where he must have been sitting for hours in the dark, and she finds herself growing annoyingly uneasy under his unrelenting stare. As the shock wears off though, she better catalogues the details of his appearance, his bearing. Fading bruises still stand out in sharp contrast to his pale face, his flesh hand is sloppily bandaged, and he sits in such a way to suggest he’s favoring his ribs on one side. “Let me guess – I should see the other guy?”

He lets out a low grunt and leans over to pull a folder out from under the bed, his movements making her reevaluate her assessment – he’s hurting all across his torso, bruised or broken ribs on both sides. “You’ve got an enemy.” He tosses the folder onto her bag and sits back heavily again, resting his head against the wall.

“Pretty sure we make at least two new ones a week.”

“Hm. Not the Avengers, per se. This one’s more personal.”

She flips open the folder and stares, confusion, surprise, and creeping dread rising inside her. “But – I don’t – Rumlow’s _dead_.”

“I can say with above average certainty that he is _not_ ,” he grunts and shifts his position, and she tries to decide if he’d find an offer of painkillers suspicious or insulting. “Though rest assured, not through lack of effort on my part.”

It takes a moment for the implication to sink in. “He’s here?”

“I doubt he lingered. He was anticipating someone a bit more… _compliant_.”

“How did he find you?”

“I missed a tracker implant.” She starts, but he waves her off with a scornful expression. “Relax, Widow. I got it out.” He pulls up the hem of his shirt, baring his stomach and revealing a bloody bandage taped over his lower right ribs.

“Jesus,” she breathes softly. “You do that yourself?”

He shrugs. “S’already healing.” A mischievous grin touches his lips. “Found a tech working late at an imaging center to find it and check for more. She was paid handsomely to compensate for the half hour she spent hysterical and convinced I’d shoot her in the head when I was through with her.”

“How generous of you.” He fixes his shirt and offers another bland shrug that goes unseen while she flips through the scant information he’s compiled on Rumlow’s survival and doings of the past several months. “Why don’t you give this to Steve?”

“I’m giving it to you.”

“What am I supposed to say?” she explodes in a harsh whisper. “ _Hey, Steve, look what I found in Sam’s closet?_ ”

“Is your whole purpose here not to keep your ear to the ground, figure out the new lay of the land?”

Swearing under her breath, she runs a hand through her hair and closes her eyes, trying to calm her frustrations. “I can’t keep doing this. It’s not fair to Steve.”

He considers her thoughtfully for a moment. “The Natalia Romanova I spoke with in Sokovia, in Donetsk, did not concern herself with things so trite as what is _fair_.”

“Things have changed.”

“Hm, yes. Your crew managed widespread destruction on three continents in an impressively narrow window of time. And – most curious of all – the girl responsible for much of it now plays for _your_ team, does she not?” Natasha can feel her jaw clenching, perturbed by just how damn much he knows. “Does she remind you of yourself? A late conversion, but a sincere one, and forever burdened by the memory of her crimes.”

“You could join our merry band of lost souls, forever chasing a redemption that’s _just_ out of our grasp.”

“I don’t think so.”

“No,” she muses slowly, trying to reconcile this new version of the former assassin, one that’s more loquacious but bitter and spiteful, with the determined yet lost man she last saw in Sokovia. “You’re not done torturing him yet, are you? Maybe my sentimentalities are trite, but your motivations are _petty_.” He blinks up at her, a mockingly polite curiosity, inviting her to elaborate. “You first ran because you didn’t know him, but now you know too much, don’t you? You know too much, and you know _you can’t trust him_.” Barnes’ eyes darken, and she watches as his metal hand makes a fist unconsciously against his leg. “You failed the last mission HYDRA gave you because you buried something inside, something so deep that it took him bleeding and on the verge of death to drag it back to the fringe of your consciousness – your _first_ mission, the one you gave yourself as a little boy with a spitfire of a friend who too easily found himself in fights he was too weak and sick to win. Did you resent him becoming Captain America? I bet you did. It undermined your mission, you suddenly became _his_ responsibility to protect… and he failed you. You don’t come to me because I’ve been where you are; you come to me because _nothing_ scares me more than going back, and you know I’ll do _whatever it takes_.”

He’s up and on her before she can blink, hauling her bodily around by the upper arms and slamming her into the sliding door of the closet. She freezes, eyes wide, listening for any indication that Steve heard the noise, will come to investigate, and Barnes seems to realize himself, closes his eyes and leans his forehead against the smooth wood of the door, exhaling a long, ragged breath. His chin rests lightly against her shoulder, long hair brushing her cheek.

The moment stretches on until they’re both convinced they remain undiscovered. Then Barnes turns his head slightly, murmurs softly against her ear, “And what do you do now, Widow?”

The barrel of her gun presses against the bloodied bandage under his shirt; it must hurt like hell, but he barely seems to notice. “Wait for you to slip up and then put you down like the rabid attack dog HYDRA trained you to be.”

The corner of his mouth pulls up in a wicked smile as he pulls back to look at her face. “You’re right. I _don’t_ trust Rogers to do that.”

“How could you? When _my_ best friend turned into a brainwashed lackey, I concussed him to bring him back – and I’d have killed him if there was no other way, rather than let him live like that. But you know that; you’ve read my file, read _all_ our files, because you can’t shake the need to keep an eye on Steve, can’t let go of that one mission, the first mission, the _only_ mission. But the kindest thing he could have done for you seventy years ago was put a bullet in your brain before you fell.”

A morbid chuckle slips past his lips and he releases her but stays where he is, blocking her against the door. “What happened to you?”

“Oh,” she smiles drily up at him, “same as you, really. Fella done me wrong.”

“I don’t expect any guilty of such a transgression to have much of a remaining life expectancy.”

She lets out a mirthless laugh and tips her head back against the closet door. “If you only knew.”

And with that, the tension breaks. He sighs and slumps, and then settles on the edge of the bed, head in his metal hand, looking more akin to the figure she’d conversed with in the church in Sokovia. “It is petty. How was he to know? It’s certainly not _rational_ , the resentment.”

“Emotions so rarely are, and you’ve probably not been able to experience them freely in a very long time.”

He looks up at her, and there’s suddenly too _much_ emotion there. Where he was lost and confused before, there’s now something tortured behind those intense eyes. “I’m not ready to be… _him_ ,” he croaks hoarsely. “ _Bucky_. I think… I think maybe one day I can. I can be that again, for Steve. But not today.”

“I know.” And really, what else is there to say? “Thank you. For the information about Rumlow. I’ll… I’ll figure out a cover story tomorrow.” She hesitates, but can’t help but ask. “Is there anything you need? Money…?”

He laughs softly at that and shakes his head, but doesn’t let her in on the joke. “A favor, perhaps?” He reaches for a battered backpack under the bed, wincing and holding his side as he hauls it up. Opening one of the front pockets, he looks up at her tentatively, almost shy, and holds out a pair of scissors.

It’s not exactly one of her more notable skills, but cutting one’s hair is an easy and obvious appearance changer for field work and she figures she can make a decent enough go of it to suffice for his purposes. But there’s something strangely intimate about it, even working quietly and quickly as they are, careful to keep the cuttings contained so the evidence can be done away with.

And when she’s done, the face out of the Smithsonian stares back at her from underneath the bruises, the shadowed eyes; the sharp twinge of guilt flares deep in her gut when she thinks of Steve, asleep downstairs, until it eventually hollows out into something cold and numb and heavy after they return to New York and Barnes has once again vanished into the world.


	3. Part III

Maria Hill brings her a report six months later; Natasha skims it, then snorts softly under her breath. “It’s a trap.”

“You _think_ , Admiral?”

Natasha ignores her, save to make a mental note to ask if Steve ever got around to watching that. “Rumlow’s good though. He has to know it’s too obvious – after all this time, the idea that it’s in _Brooklyn_ that Barnes would trip up? – but he knows Cap wouldn’t be able to resist it.” Her brow furrows thoughtfully. “Could be hoping Barnes takes an interest too.”

Maria clears her throat awkwardly. “And Barnes could be working _with_ Rumlow.” She can’t exactly deny the possibility without giving something away, but she has the sense that Maria suspects more than she’ll say. “Why do I get the feeling that Cap isn’t the _only_ one who won’t be able to resist looking into this?”

“Difference,” Natasha holds up a halting finger. “Cap would go in looking like a nostalgic, lovesick puppy.”

“And what will _you_ go in looking like?” 

She flashes a dangerous smile. “Someone prepared to blow Brock Rumlow’s balls off.”

 

X---X

 

Maria has to meet with Pepper anyway, and Pepper begs her to bring Rhodey to hang out with Tony, who is reportedly still spending far too many sleepless nights barricaded in his workshop in Friday’s and Dum-E’s company. Natasha just invites herself along, and then takes the first opportunity no one will miss her to slip away, liberate a motorcycle from the garage, and start making her way south towards the Brooklyn Bridge.

Steve and Sam, she left upstate at the new training center.

She finds a parking spot of questionable legality near Battery Park and walks the rest of the way to the river, finds a spot to sit and stare across the waterway, along the busy bridge, trying to put herself in Brock Rumlow’s mind.

It’s not an easy task. She’d worked alongside Rumlow dozens of times over nearly a year without realizing he and his whole team were HYDRA, trying to turn the whole of S.H.I.E.L.D. in one arcing mission that would have seen the deaths of millions of people worldwide and turned the agency into an unopposable force for global domination.

And that was _before_ Rumlow had been nearly crushed to death, recovered to find his life’s work crumbling apart at the behest of Steve and the rest of the Avengers. God only knew the kind of mental state he was in. _Physically_ though… well, he’d fought Barnes and lived to tell the tale four months ago, had landed more than a few good hits. He’d been an expert fighter before, but is he something more, now?

Natasha’s never quite bought into the whole _cut off one head and two take its place_ bullshit HYDRA mantra, but she can’t deny that the organization is a goddamn cockroach. And if they’re still experimenting with serums, trying to recreate Erskine’s formula… if they’re _succeeding_ …

A wave of weariness takes her by surprise, and there’s bitter longing close on its heels when she thinks about the futile dream of running away with Bruce, leaving all of it behind to be someone else’s problem. They _got_ Strucker. Got the Maximoffs on their side, supported Wanda through her grief and kept her from channeling it back outwards in anger and despair. Found a safe guardian for the power of Loki’s scepter.

She appreciates what Tony wanted to achieve with Ultron, truly. But she’s known for a long time that she’ll be fighting until the day she dies, that some battles are about the eternal give and take and there’s never any true victory, not really.

Steve figured that out, about the time that a S.H.I.E.L.D. missile nearly killed them in a secret bunker at his old training post in New Jersey. Tony finally accepted it when he recommended sacrificing thousands of Sokovians for the greater good, knowing the whole team would have died with them had Fury not shown up in spectacular, timely fashion.

This fight though, here and now… not against HYDRA, but against this one man and all he represents, all he threatens… this fight, she is determined to win, if not for her own sake then for Steve’s.

And maybe even beyond that, for James Buchanan Barnes. 

Mind made up, she picks herself up off the ground and turns her back on the distant Brooklyn skyline.

 

X---X

 

That night, she prepares an arsenal. A compact one, to be sure, to be carried without earning any undue attention, and one designed with a dense urban population surrounding any potential fight in mind. Electrical shock discs, flash grenades, smoke bombs, explosives with a decidedly smaller effective radius than she’s used to or prefers.

Guns. A few guns, and lots of extra clips.

Tony wanders down to the armory as she’s lining up her final selections, just stands leaning against the doorway watching her for a long moment. “Come off it, Stark,” she rebukes without turning, “this is hardly the worst thing you’ve ever caught me doing.”

“What _are_ you doing?”

She peers over her shoulder and flashes a smirk. “Getting into trouble.”

He doesn’t answer right away, and when she finishes packing up her haul she turns to face him and finds a strange look in his eyes. It’s not quite disapproving and not quite concerned, but there are elements of both, and maybe a shade of wistfulness. Retirement is making him melancholy, she decides.

“Let me know if you need any help,” he offers at last, when she’s clearly not planning to elaborate.

“Getting into trouble, or getting back out of it again?”

“ _Yes_ ,” he stresses, and then disappears back to his workshop.

She spends the next two hours huddled in her old suite, back when the tower was headquarters, pouring over the report Maria had provided suggesting Barnes’ presence in Brooklyn and cross-checking addresses on a map Friday projected in front of her. Then she spends another hour reading everything they’ve compiled on Brock Rumlow, and an hour after that skimming everything on file pertaining to Barnes’ old life in Brooklyn.

Then she sleeps for three hours before slipping out in the early light and disappearing into the bedlam of morning commuter traffic.

The Lincoln Tunnel takes her from Midtown into New Jersey, and she spends the day driving aimlessly – deceptively armored sports car, this time – keeping a wary eye on any potential tails, stopping at random stores, restaurants, offices, houses, until she’s confident that she’s slipped any eyes that might have followed her out of Tony’s building. She winds her way slowly down to Staten Island, and then crosses her way into Brooklyn on the Verrazano Bridge in the chaos of the afternoon rush hour.

And she bides her time until nightfall.

 

X---X

 

It takes about twenty minutes of playing hide-and-seek through a crumbling warehouse district in Greenpoint for Natasha to realize that she has sorely, drastically, _epically_ miscalculated. The trap wasn’t meant for Steve, it was set for her all along and she waltzed right into it, except she’s getting the sinking feeling that ultimately, she was never designed to serve as anything more than bait for a bigger prize.

Even sneaking around, ducking into dusty corners and trying not to make too much noise on rusted nails and broken glass, and occasionally dispatching yet another of what seems to be an endless supply of kamikaze henchmen, it doesn’t take her too terribly long to put these pieces together. She’s been herded but not cornered, is boxed in to this abandoned building but left enough space to maneuver, to fight, when sheer force of numbers could have easily overwhelmed her by now for the kill or capture.

Rumlow doesn’t want her dead, not yet. He wants her desperate enough to draw attention or call for help.

He knows they’ve been in touch, knows she came alone in the interests of protecting that secret.

He’s after Barnes.

It makes some sense. Their vicious encounter in D.C. would have prioritized the ex-assassin as a threat to be eliminated, once it became clear that he would not be ordered back into the fold - HYDRA probably tolerated traitors with far less grace than enemies. In turn, he must have realized that Barnes tipped somebody off, could probably deduce well enough that it wasn’t Steve.

Whatever the motivations, she had well and good walked herself right into this one, and is reminded again of the skill of Rumlow’s treachery. He’d played her for months, why shouldn’t he be just as adept at it now?

Ejecting a used clip and inserting a new one in its place, she rests her head against the wall and counts steps, growing louder.

They pause…

A round bursts through the cracking wall three inches from her head and she turns instinctively, squeezing her eyes shut as she drops and rolls, blindly flinging a flash grenade in the direction of her attackers and counting _one, two, three_ …

The world lights up even from behind eyelids pressed firmly closed and then she’s up, taking advantage of her stalkers’ reversion from night-vision goggles to complete blindness to run full-tilt in a more-or-less straight line towards a collapsed garage doorway on the adjacent wall of the warehouse, glass and bits of masonry crackling underfoot and giving them a sense of her location and bearing, even if they still can’t see. A round smashes into the floor two feet to her left, and another six inches in front of her as she runs but she doesn’t slow pace.

And then she’s diving to the side as two figures appear in the doorway she’s heading towards, unburdened by the sudden blindness as the rest of the team. She fires as she rolls but the shots go wide. Halting at some rough cover, a stack of rotting building materials, she realizes that the blinded team is regaining some confidence and her cover will be worthless as soon as they get close enough to spot her, too wary of her flash grenades to put the goggles back on…

She flinches as a shot rings out and then another, and she’s just starting to wonder if they’ve given up on the whole _not killing her_ thing when she realizes that the two men in the doorway have dropped dead, a single hole in the center of each forehead, and she’s up again and diving for the door even as more shots start peppering the team approaching from the other side, shouts calling for cover, more shouts freezing her blood.

“Target spotted third level, east side catwalk heading north!”

He’s here.

The players have all danced marvelously to Rumlow’s tune, and Barnes is here.

Steve is going to _kill_ her.

Provided she gets out of this alive first, of course.

She bursts out into the night air and a crash sounds above her. She flattens herself against the wall of the building and shifts her aim up in time to see a figure land heavily atop an overturned industrial-sized dumpster ten feet to her right, roll with an impossible grace and fall the last bit of the way to the ground and come up standing.

Movement draws her attention back up to the window he’d jumped from, and she dispatches that agent with a shot to the face. A near simultaneous shot rings past her left ear to put down another who followed her out the doorway.

Barnes beckons her to him with an impatient twitch of his rifle, and then sends another HYDRA thug into the afterlife as she covers the distance. “Walked right into this one, didn’t you?” he growls as she skids to a halt and crouches low by his side, checking her clips and peering up over the edge of the dumpster.

“I thought it was Steve he wanted.”

“So did I,” Barnes confirms in a low grunt.

“You do realize _you’re_ the target?” He spares a moment’s distraction to shoot her a derisive look, and she grins. “Well – took you long enough.”

“Relax, Romanoff, I was getting you a present.”

Her grin broadens. “Oh? Is it more HYDRA lackeys with bullets in their brains?”

“Better.” He shoves her down abruptly and covers her, metal arm arched over her head. His flesh hand presses something into one of hers. “Would you like to do the honors?”

It’s a detonator.

Barnes brought toys _much_ more fun than hers.

The building collapses from the inside out, explosives strategically planted. A wave of splintered wood and concrete chunks smash into the other side of the dumpster from where they’re cowering and dust rises up around, thick and smothering. A single hunk of stone from the roof falls over them, breaking in two on the edge of the dumpster and then deflected by the metal arm protecting their heads, and Barnes barely seems to register the impact.

She’s got her face pressed down against her shoulder when Barnes drags her to her feet again. “C’mon- _move_ ,” he half pulls her along until she finds her footing, and she trusts he knows where he’s going in the ensuing nearly-blind dash across fifty yards of open ground, stumbling on cracked concrete and choking on dust and debris in the air.

Sirens are already splitting the night air when the noise of the explosion dies down to a low roar in her ears. Barnes drags her to a stop alongside an outlying garage, yanking a tarp off of a pair of sleek motorcycles.

Barnes _definitely_ brought more fun toys than she did.

“Get to the road and head north,” he orders as he straps the rifle around his shoulders and swings himself onto one bike. “He’ll have air support, so take the tunnel into Midtown and _get back to Stark’s_.”

“What about you?”

He grits his teeth. “I’m gonna kill the sonuvabitch.”

“Oh, _Soldier_.” They whip around in tandem as a nightmare steps out of the garage, face hidden behind an encompassing masked helmet, painted like a stylized skull, but the voice is terrible and unmistakable. “Did we truly allow you to become so predictable?” Even if she can’t see it, she can hear the devilish smirk in his words. “Bravo team, prepare for extraction.”

Natasha has her gun up and pointed at Rumlow’s masked face, and then fires wide as a hand hooks under the collar of her suit and drags her backwards up and off the bike. Barnes’ metal arm flings her through the air to land ten feet away, smashing hard into the ground at the corner of the building. He uses the momentum to flip himself off of his vehicle and then kicks it sideways with impossible strength, sending both motorcycles skidding and toppling to the ground.

Natasha’s bike blows an instant later, and she sees Barnes fly backwards to slam into the wall of the building – the whole structure shudders under his weight – before she shields her eyes against the glare and the heat.

Barnes shakes off the impact that would have knocked an average man unconscious and pulls the rifle from his shoulder. Rumlow’s there in an instant, kicking the barrel away and forcing Barnes to use his arms to block a flurry of punches and kicks, fighting in close to prevent her from getting a decent shot. A metal fist smashes into Rumlow’s mask and doesn’t so much as crack it, his step barely falters. A knife slices deep into Barnes’ right arm, before he grips it by the blade with his left hand and tears it out of the other man’s grasp, sending it spinning to the ground.

She leaps into the fray and whirls a shock disk under Barnes’ arm. Rumlow crushes it between two fingers without so much as a flinch, and then has a gun of his own leveled at her before she can expend too much energy wondering what material his gloves and mask are made from. She dives sideways and Barnes seizes Rumlow’s weapon arm, wrestling the barrel up and out of line.

“Soldier, that’s _enough_ ,” Rumlow snaps. “Protocol: mission reset.” Abruptly, before she can parse the meaning of the words, Barnes releases his grip on Rumlow’s weapon and whirls on Natasha, eyes wide, breathing suddenly heavy and panicked in a way wholly foreign to the calm ferocity when he fights. He reaches for her right wrist as it draws the gun at her hip and pulls her aim away from Rumlow and up.

He aims her weapon at his own forehead, point blank range.

_And what do you do now, Widow?_

She bites back a shocked exclamation and tries to pull away, tries to swing her aim down and over his shoulder, but then Rumlow speaks again, deceptively soft. “Reset passcode _: Laika_.”

_What do you do now?_

The last expression to flash through Barnes’ eyes before they revert to an abrupt, eerie blankness, is one of complete and utter betrayal.


	4. Part IV

The expected kill shot doesn’t come. Not yet, anyway. Barnes twists the pistol out of her hand almost effortlessly in her sudden horror, but just lets it drop to the ground and returns to blank stillness.

“Neat, isn’t he?” Rumlow murmurs.

“I guess you’ve been busy,” Natasha grits out, hands twitching reflexively, trying to figure out what weapon within her reach could remedy this situation, or even just put Rumlow down before Barnes kills her.

“I had no idea, the complexities of his programming,” Rumlow acknowledges, almost amicably. “My mistake really, approaching him six months ago without doing the proper research. If any of his old handlers survived the purge though, they’ve gone so deep underground – probably to hide from _him_.”

She wonders how many Barnes hunted down and killed after tearing apart the old facility where it all started in the Austrian Alps. “So where’d you find the user manual?” she asks, stalling for time but with no especial expectation for it doing any good. “Was it Pierce? It was probably Pierce, buried that nifty trick somewhere for when Steve inevitably tripped something in his scrambled head.”

Barnes twitches, and Natasha stares into his eyes for any sign of comprehension, any sign of hearing her at all really. “You remember him, right?” she asks softly. “Your best friend. Steve Rogers. You came here tonight to _protect him_.” There’s no indication that her words are registering, and she finds herself pleading softly, “C’mon, please. Remember the mission. The first mission, the _only_ mission that ever mattered, Bucky -”

He snarls, and the metal hand backhands her and sends her spinning to the ground, split lip aching and gasping for breath. Rumlow laughs delightedly and hauls her up by her hair, relieving her of any remaining weapons on her person. “Alright, Soldier, you can have your fun later.” _Great_. “Got a narrow window on our ride out of here.” He puts his masked mouth down close to Natasha’s ear. “Still – you might prove some useful leverage down the line.”

“You know _nothing_ if you think -”

He grips her throat in one hand and squeezes tight. “I was on the _Lemurian Star_ , honey – I know _exactly_ what your people are willing to do to save the lives of their own.”

“Or those we _think_ are our own,” she gasps out when he slackens his hold slightly.

“Or that,” he concedes.

“Barnes,” she tries to catch his blank gaze again. “ _Please_. Please try to remember. Remember the church, in Sokovia? You said you _didn’t_ want to fight us? To fight me?”

Rumlow scoffs impatiently behind her. “He’s gone, Romanoff.”

He starts to pull her along, and she can hear a helicopter approaching distantly. “Remember finding me in D.C.?” she tries again. “You came to warn me. You _trusted_ me, trusted that I wouldn’t let you become _this_ again, that I’d do whatever it takes.” Dark eyes tighten and Barnes stops walking.

“Soldier,” Rumlow reprimands, hauling Natasha around and keeping her trapped between him and Barnes. “The mission is finished. Let’s go.”

“I’m trusting _you_ , Barnes,” Natasha plows ahead, wondering when Rumlow’s patience will wear thin and he’ll just dispatch of her here and now. “I’m trusting you to know your own mind, not just the _programming_ some sadistic scientist tried to put there instead. You’ve been fighting for it too long. _Remember D.C._ You found Steve again. You overcame it _for Steve_. You told me six months ago that you thought you could be Bucky again _for Steve_.”

His expression darkens further, mouth twisting into a deep frown, and then he’s swinging the rifle down off his shoulders and leveling it at her head.

And it occurs somewhere in the back of her mind – there are worse ways to go.

“For fuck’s sake,” Rumlow swears. “You want to shoot her that bad, Soldier? Fine.”

She tenses for the inevitable, but Barnes speaks instead. Slow, careful words, almost curious. “I shot you before.”

“Yes,” Rumlow growls impatiently. “She was as much a meddlesome nuisance in Washington as she is here. Do you want to shoot her or not?”

His eyes drift sideways, searching… thinking?... and then snap back up to Natasha. “Not just there. There was a road on…on a hill?”

“A cliff,” she corrects faintly. “You shot out the tires.” Pause. “You remember Odessa?”

“I remember…” his gaze drifts and snaps back again. “I remember,” he muses more definitively.

“Well,” she breathes, hyper-aware of Rumlow’s position behind her, the power of the rifle in Barnes’ hands, angles, weak spots… “What’s one more, then?”

Faster than blinking, he shifts aim downwards… and fires. She can’t stop the cry of pain as the bullet tears through her right side, but she spins with it, reaching up with her left hand and ripping the mask plate free from Rumlow’s helmet even as he crashes down with her, bleeding from the hip.

If Rumlow has become what she suspects, the wound would hardly be enough to slow him down, let alone incapacitate him, the bullet slowed first by her body and the armored material of his suit. But he’s tangled up in her dead weight, so to speak, and three long strides put Barnes standing over them, staring down with an expression still unnaturally blank as he steps on the arm Rumlow is using to fumble for a weapon.

His voice though is regaining a more natural timbre when he orders quietly, “Call off the extraction team.”

Maybe Rumlow realizes they wouldn’t make the rendezvous point anyway. Maybe he realizes that there’s no salvaging this without a fully compliant Winter Soldier.

Maybe he thinks Natasha gives a damn whether he lives or dies.

“Bravo team,” Rumlow grits out as Barnes puts more weight on his arm. “Abort. Repeat – abort.” He turns an expression burning with hatred on Barnes. “You think I’m the only one out there looking to bring you to heel, Soldier? You think the next one, or the one after that, won’t know just what to say and do to you to get you to walk up to Rogers on the street and shoot him in the face?”

She sees Barnes swallow thickly, sees the very real fear seeping back into his eyes. His tone remains level though when he corrects Rumlow, “I’m not your _Soldier_. _Not_ anymore. My name is James Buchanan Barnes.”

He fires a single shot into the center of Rumlow’s forehead.

She cringes against the noise so close to her head, and her ears are still ringing when she feels hands go under her knees and shoulders, moving her away from the body and setting her back down before digging frantically through pockets. “R’nt you 1940s boys s’posed to buy me dinner first?” she slurs, realizing the futility of her efforts to keep her hands, slick with blood on the smooth material of her suit, pressed on the entrance wound when she’s just bleeding out the back too.

He finally succeeds in locating her phone, and his voice sounds distant and fuzzy as he snaps into it, “Agent Romanoff is down and needs immediate extraction from this location.” His face swims back into view and he looks her over, brow furrowing with worry.

“The firs’ time you got me’n the _left_ side,” she complains.

“I understand symmetry is pleasing to the eye,” he counters. 

A rough laugh escapes her. “Who’dgu call? Stark?” He nods. “You should go. I’ll be fine. He… won’t be long.”

 

 

To James Buchanan Barnes’ everlasting shame, he considers it. Not for long; but he does.

His head is a mess, overlapping layers of memories and missions, orders and programming, and _cold_ , bitter cold, and the sense before of memories falling just out of his reach has rebounded and there’s too much, too many pictures with too many details and some of them are _terrible_ but a lot of them are good, so good, and inexplicably in the middle of it is this bleeding, diminutive firebrand of a woman he’s now shot _three times_ and he _remembers_ them all, vividly, but it’s like watching a movie out of someone else’s eyes, trapped inside someone’s head and it’s so much, too much.

But she’s bleeding and he doesn’t have much he can do about it here. Sirens and lights are coming closer, firetrucks are setting up at the site of the burning warehouse he just blew up, and it won’t be long until the police or SWAT or whoever sweep their way around the perimeter and stumble across this grisly scene, shielded from sight by the outlying garage. He’s betting Stark can get to her first though.

And him. 

He doesn’t know what will happen then. He just knows that he’s tired beyond measure.

 

 

He drifts; is vaguely cognizant of a woozy Romanoff talking at him, but he only has about enough focus left to keep his hands pressed over the wound in her lower abdomen, and then a time later – it can’t be more than five or ten minutes, a lingering rational part of his brain realizes – there’s a flurry of noise and lights and voices and a man in a silver metal suit is standing before them and he’s familiar in a vague sort of way, like maybe Bucky’s read about him or seen him on the television but before he can consider it too much hands are pulling him back, lifting Romanoff onto a stretcher. He faintly hears her mumbling something that sounds like _Rhodey, wait…_ and then she’s gone and it’s just him and the metal man with any number of weapons pointed down on him.

It takes an oddly long moment to realize that he’s being threatened, detained.

Carefully, slowly, he sits back on his heels and laces his blood-stained fingers behind his head. The movement makes him suddenly aware of a gash on his right arm, the sting grounding him back into his surroundings a bit. He sees the stretcher being wheeled up the ramp of a small aircraft; sees a second being brought down and loaded with Rumlow’s body several feet away.

Sees a dark-haired man in a fine suit standing at the base of the ramp, hands tucked casually into his pockets, just watching as the man in the silver armor pulls him to his feet and secures his hands with some sort of magnetic clamp. An instinctive, cursory tug reveals the restraints are either too strong for him to break or he’s simply too weakened, too apathetic, _too damn tired_ to fight for his freedom.

He’s marched to the craft, turbines already kicking back up in preparation for lift-off. The man at the ramp doesn’t move save to follow their progress with his eyes. The decades are bouncing back and forth in Bucky’s head, the early years characterized by the constant of _Steve_ and the later ones by _cold_ and _pain_ , but they aren’t linear, aren’t in any decipherable order as they flash through his head and he squeezes his eyes shut as he hits the base of the ramp and can only think _Howard_ as he passes the oddly stoic man, and then thinks he might have said it aloud by the way heavy metallic footsteps falter.

Then he’s shoved into a seat and doesn’t think about much at all. Conversations are whispered around him, or possibly he’s just hearing them that way, muffled and distorted, while his head struggles to put the world back together piece by piece, image by image, sound by sound, until he can regain a sense of his present bearing, his present… mission?

… _disappeared after D.C. Most everyone thought he was dead after all this time, but that arm, man, that’s pretty recognizable. I need to make some calls._

_Can you do me a favor and hold off, Rhodey? Give me a few hours to sort some things out._

_I thought Maria was handling the_ actual _authorities._

_She is. I’m talking team stuff. Actually, can you get ahold of Cap, tell him about Natasha?_ Only _Natasha?_

He zones out fully after that, rests his chin on his chest and closes his eyes until his awareness eventually slips away to nothingness.

 

X---X

 

He jerks back into consciousness when a soft, disembodied Irish voice says, “Excuse me, sir.”

“What the _hell…_?”

He sits up, finds himself in what is clearly some sort of observational holding cell. There’s a table with two chairs in the middle of the room, while he’s been lying on a cot along one wall. His arms are free, which is a pleasant surprise at least; there’s a bandage around the knife wound on his right forearm and the blood has been washed from his hands. A glimpse at the mirror across the room shows an effort was made to clear some of the grime from his face as well.

The combat vest is gone however, and the scars at the site where metal joins flesh stand out angrily in the fluorescent lighting.

“I’m sorry, sir. Boss needs to speak with you soon, and asked that I check if you were coherent once more.”

_Once more_. He doesn’t much like the sound of that, but just throws up a shoulder in a half-shrug, unsure where to direct his attention. “Uh. Yeah, sure.”

Not thirty seconds later, a section of smooth metal wall slides up and admits two men. He recognizes them, in general and from earlier on that… _night?_... he has no idea what time has passed since getting pulled out of Brooklyn. And he’s even cognizant enough to put names to the faces.

The first, the man in the armored suit, now dressed in regular clothing but tense enough that he looks like he’d _rather_ be in the War Machine outfit – James Rhodes. Army colonel, retired. Avenger.

The second is Tony Stark, and Bucky has just enough time to be baffled at _not_ recalling his name earlier, when the billionaire raises his hand and tosses a sweatshirt across the room. “Here you go, homeslice.” He catches it on instinct, unfolds it and looks at the front before putting it on.

Raises a brow. “You fuckin’ kidding me?”

Stark chortles as he wrestles the hoodie over his head, Captain America shield displayed proudly on the front. “Sorry. It was a gag gift, can’t imagine why Cap didn’t take it with him when he moved his stuff out. Not much else on hand would fit you.”

The way they watch him as he stills at that casual revelation tells him it was purposefully done. Seeing what impact the reference to Steve has on him.

He just shoves his hands into the pocket and hunches his shoulders, feeling weary and exposed. “Is… is Romanoff alright?”

“Ah, yeah,” Stark says, “Didn’t really hit anything. Cleaning and closing, you know.” He pauses a moment, then sits in one of the chairs at the table and leans forward, elbows resting on his thighs. “Impressive shot.”

He’s glad to hear it, but it’s still not exactly what he wants to hear, and he presses his head back against the hard wall trying to understand what this _is_. Rhodes remains standing, hasn’t moved far into the room beyond the doorway, and is watching the proceedings with an ever-deepening frown on his face. Stark just looks supremely unconcerned, about anything, which might well be an act in its own right. “What, ah… what happens now?”

Stark jerks his head back in the direction of his companion. “Well, despite Natasha telling us that you were a-okay – she was more with it on the ride back than you were, for the record – Rhodey over here seems to think you’re some kind of HYDRA master assassin and wants to call some nice people who will undoubtedly haul you away and bury you somewhere for the rest of your life.”

He swallows thickly at that, and can’t find much to argue the point. “Yeah.”

It’s quiet for a moment while Stark stares at him expectantly, and then he sighs heavily and rubs at his forehead. “Oh, for… look. I’m trying to help you out here, but I need you to play ball.” Except Bucky’s still not sure what Stark _wants_ from him, until he says with a thoughtful frown, “You know, I was curious when Cap told me I hadn’t seen his dark side yet, but I wasn’t expecting to get to sit down and interview it.” Bucky’s eyes shoot up at that, and Stark rolls his in turn. “Yeah, I know who you are. Do _you_ know who you are? I need to know you’re all in there, or there’s nothing I can do.”

“Tony,” Rhodes steps in from the door and murmurs low under his breath, “I don’t know if -”

Stark just holds up a hand, piercing gaze never leaving the hunched form on the cot. “What were you doing in Brooklyn last night?”

“Watching Brock Rumlow – S.H.I.E.L.D, strike, HYDRA, believed dead since September 2014 – lay a trap.”

“And what was Natasha doing there?” he prompts softly.

“Walking straight into it,” he responds with a derisive snort.

“You know Natasha?”

Rhodes scoffs from the other side of the room. “Of course he knows Natasha, he _shot_ Natasha two years ago, right before nearly killing Steve, and Tony, _what_ are we doing here?”

But Stark doesn’t move and his gaze doesn’t leave Bucky and eventually he finds his voice. “We’ve made some… deals? exchanges?... since I left HYDRA.”

“How’d you leave?”

“I… I remembered.” Stark nods once, an invitation to elaborate. He obliges, tone faint and hollow. “Hurting Steve felt… wrong. With no handlers left to recall me, put me in the chair and start over, I rejected the mission. Pulled him from the river. Verified the identity I’d once had as best I was able and crossed paths with Romanoff several months later looking for more answers.”

“And what is that identity?”

Despite himself, Rhodes starts to look more curious than impatient, and he leans in as Bucky murmurs faintly, “Barnes. James Buchanan Barnes.” And then slightly more confidently: “Bucky. Steve… calls me Bucky.”

Rhodes blinks once, twice. “Uh… _what_?”

Stark taps the tabletop twice and stands. “Alright. That’s all I needed to hear. I don’t know what game Natasha’s been playing, but we’re going to wait and do the rest of this with Cap, who should be here inside an hour. We’ll put you somewhere you can eat, shower, whatever, and I’ll convince Rhodey here not to throw you in a hole, capeesh?”

“I – wait, no, it’s not…” Stark raises a brow as Bucky jumps to his feet; Rhodes shifts, like he’s expecting a fight. “Rumlow _knew_ , he knew the words to… to make me forget _again_ , and…”

“And Natasha says you shook him off and shot him in the face.” He stops, blinks. “I mean, you had your little dissociative fit and kind of shut down on us there for a bit, but you’re cool, right? Yeah, you’re fine.”

He swallows thickly. “How do you _know_?”

Stark grimaces. “Because you’re _terrified_.”


	5. Part V

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final part! With a special mid-afternoon posting instead of a bedtime posting so, woohoo. Longer one, too.

Steve arrives three hours after getting the call, and wastes no time making his way down to the medical wing. Tony is standing just outside the swinging doors to the small surgical suite that’s probably not seen much use since the team relocated up north, but Steve supposes Tony has the resources and pull to make it functional on a moment’s notice.

He’s leaning against the wall, hands tucked in his pockets in the picture of nonchalance, and a tightness eases in Steve’s chest as he comes to a halt alongside. “How is she?”

“She’ll be alright. Through and through, didn’t cause _too_ much damage along the way. They just finished up, she won’t be awake for a couple hours.”

A relieved sigh escapes him, but he runs an anxious hand through his hair, vibrating with energy, the need to do something useful. “Right, okay. Good.” A deep breath fails to calm or focus him. “Right. What do we know? What was she even doing, for God’s sake?”

“Caught wind of some HYDRA-types in Brooklyn, actually.” Tony straightens from his perch against the wall as he speaks, pulling his hands from his pockets and crossing his arms over his chest.

“Brooklyn,” Steve repeats, unimpressed. “That’s… huh.”

Tony shrugs. “You’ll see it on the news. Firefight, burning buildings, you know. Chaos. What Natasha does best.”

Tony can almost _hear_ Steve swallow nervously around the next question. “I guess there’s nothing on the shooter, then, ballistics, if it was a through shot…?”

“Would you know, we got the slug actually.” And in a fit of awful premonition, Steve knows what Tony is going to say a moment before the words pass his lips. “Soviet. No rifling.”

That doesn’t have to mean something, but it happened in Brooklyn and so it means _everything_ , and disbelief and denial and despair all well up in him at once, choke him, and he can barely get the words out. He’s been here before; he knows the script. Whispers: “I know who shot Natasha.”

Tony’s response is not _quite_ how Steve imagined it, claps him heartily on the shoulder. “Yeah, I’ll bet you do. I mean _my God_ , Cap. The man shoots and nearly kills Fury, shoots Natasha, shoots you one, two, three… three times? And I think there was a stab wound in there too?... and then _beats_ you half to death – and what do you do? Dither and prevaricate and suggest the shadowy, shockingly _long-lived_ assassin got blown to smithereens on the helicarrier you fell off of.” Steve closes his eyes, breath leaving in a rush. “Now gosh, I am just racking my mind trying to think why Captain America would _do_ that!”

Feeling utterly defeated, he mumbles, “How much do you know?”

Tony grins. “I’m a genius, I know everything. Are you feeling appropriately contrite for all the bullshit about the team keeping secrets from you, our righteous leader? Good,” he ignores the glare and forcibly guides Steve back down the hallway to the elevators. “Now come on.”

Steve doesn’t know what he’s expecting. A strategy session or a bender sound like equally likely options, but when Tony orders Friday to take them down to the floor that used to be Steve’s, when the team was based here, he frowns deeply. “Why-?”

“Shut up. Don’t spoil it. We’re about to have a capital-M _moment_.”

“I thought I was supposed to be feeling _contrite_.”

“We did that part already, moving on. For Christ’s sake, Cap, keep up.” The door slides open and they step into the suite’s kitchenette. There’s an empty yogurt container on the table, banana and orange peels, a mug half-full with tea, but no one to claim the haphazard breakfast. Tony whistles. “Oy. Friday. Where’d he go? Tell me he didn’t climb out a window or something.”

A quiet voice approaches from the bedroom. “What does it say that I…” he trails off as he reaches the doorway and sees Tony and Steve standing there, the former smiling faintly, unassuming, and the latter staring in wide-eyed incredulity, “…never thought about it?” Then adds in a soft murmur, “Steve.”

“It says you’re done running,” Tony tells him quietly, glancing sidelong at the myriad expressions flitting across Steve’s face. “At least for today.”

“ _Buck_ ,” Steve whispers, and then shakes his head and startles. “I don’t – I don’t understand. Did you… did he… did you shoot Natasha?”

Bucky presses his lips together and looks down at the ground. Tony wavers a hand. “In a very literal sense, yes, but -”

“There’s not exactly a _non-literal_ sense, Tony!”

“ _But_ ,” Tony grinds out, “I’d put it more like… Natasha was… in the bullet’s way.”

Steve turns on him, slack-jawed. “I don’t even…”

“Rumlow,” Bucky breaks in, still not looking up, looking impossibly young and confused, swathed in _a goddamn Captain America collector’s hoodie_ , “I shot Rumlow. I killed Rumlow.”

“You shot…” His statement mixes with Tony’s roundabout explanations and takes him back again to that moment of frustration with Natasha in the hospital in D.C. _I know who shot Fury_ … _I was escorting a nuclear engineer out of Iran… The Winter Soldier was there…_ “You shot Rumlow. _Through_ Natasha.”

Bucky shrugs helplessly, glancing up unsure, nervous. “She _told_ me to?”

“And then he called me,” Tony adds. “Called me, and stayed to make sure she didn’t bleed out, instead of running.”

With a choked laugh that’s more of a sob and not even sure which of them moved or if both of them did, Steve finds himself pulling his wayward friend into a fierce embrace, and for that moment, he lets himself forget that it won’t be this easy, that there’s so much that needs to be hashed out just amongst themselves and the rest of the team, let alone keeping Bucky safe from any number of people and organizations that would like to see him arrested or killed. He buries his face into the fabric of the sweatshirt over the warm, flesh shoulder, feels Bucky slowly, carefully, relax into his hold, and hears Tony murmur that he’ll be in touch later to start having the inevitable conversation but can’t even find it in himself to pull his attention away to acknowledge the words. 

Tony seems to understand though.

 

X---X

 

“You’ve been holding out on me.”

She groans; hasn’t even opened her eyes yet, Steve must’ve been watching the monitors as her foggy brain drifted back into consciousness. “Surely,” she mumbles, blinking quickly against even the dim lighting of the room, “there’s a grace period on getting yelled at while I’m in a damn hospital bed.”

A light chuckle surprises her, and she supposes he’s not as mad as he could be. _Should_ be, even. “Yeah, well. Bucky asked me not to.” And her eyes snap open at that as all the details of the night prior flood back in, and inevitable consequences when he’d chosen not to run. Steve sees her thoughts whirling behind her eyes and smiles reassuringly, if a bit sadly. “He’s fine. He’s… napping, actually.” He rubs at the back of his neck. “Honestly, I think it’s the first time in the last two years he’s felt like he can sleep securely.”

She thinks about the few hours he slept like the dead on the floor of Sam’s old room at the townhouse, just a pillow for his head and tucked in the relatively contained space between the bed and the closet, far from the window; wisely chooses _not_ to mention this here and now. Possibly (probably) not ever.

“I won’t pretend I’m _happy_ about it,” Steve continues quietly, after a moment’s pause. “But I… think I understand. Or I will, when the dust settles.”

“How much does he remember?”

There’s a hoarse edge to Steve’s voice that she pretends she doesn’t notice. “Ah… a lot. Enough. The um… the old days are pretty intact, far as I can tell. Everything since D.C. He remembers you, each of your encounters, but the rest of it is pretty hit-or-miss. Flashes, he said, random images that survived the memory wipes and the cryo.

“Anyway,” he wipes at his eyes quickly and offers a watery half-smile. “I just wanted to check in. You should rest.”

She nods slowly, relaxing back into her pillows, but then finds herself calling out, halting him at the door. “Steve?” He half-turns, hand on the handle. “He had to find himself before he could find you. You get that, right?" 

He gives her a jerky, stilted nod and ducks out the door.

 

X---X

 

Tony surprises Steve by not reappearing until the following morning. Twenty-four hours of which Bucky sleeps nearly sixteen, eats ravenously of food he eyed suspiciously at first but finally relaxed into when Steve’s nerves calmed enough to dig in as well, and spends much of the remaining time sitting in the darkest corner of the suite’s living area, alone with his thoughts while Steve comes and goes.

Steve makes a point to acknowledge his presence every so often when Bucky retreats, even if just to put a glass of water on the table beside him or touch a light hand to his shoulder in passing. He’s not sure if it makes a difference one way or another, but figures that if Bucky wanted total solitude, he’d have disappeared into the bedroom.

Bucky’s flesh and blood hand twitches the first two times Steve touches him. The third time he takes the hint and pulls that hand into one of his own, and then crouches on the floor in front of the chair and grasps the metal hand as well, staring intently up at the shadowed, lost face before him. “I’m with you, huh?”

A broken smile in return. “End o’the line?”

“That’s right,” and he doesn’t know what else to say or do to help repair the pieces of a fractured life, has expended so much yearning energy into just getting here to this moment, Bucky at his side, that the thought of what comes _next_ is beyond his current capacity to process. But after a moment, Bucky slides to the floor and they shift so they’re side by side, backs pressed against the front of the armchair. Bucky hesitates a moment, and then rests his head against Steve’s shoulder. 

They stay like that, Bucky’s right hand still clasped in Steve’s left, until Steve’s lost track of the passing time and silent tears have soaked through the thin fabric of his shirt sleeve.

 

 

 

After a two minute heads-up from the Irish woman’s voice, Stark shows up while they’re eating breakfast. Or, rather, a meal at a traditional breakfast hour.

“Hey, look at that,” he leans over and grabs a slice of cold pizza. “Get some warm beer and I’ll think I’ve gone back to college.”

Steve cocks a brow. “Weren’t you _fifteen_ when you went to college?”

Stark doesn’t deign respond to that; instead, drags out a chair and sits, promptly forgetting the pizza slice as he props his head in one hand, staring across the table at Bucky and rubbing thoughtfully at his goatee. “So. Buckaroo.”

Bucky cringes, but returns a hesitant, “Yeah?”

“You’re fed, watered, rested. Reunited with your senior soulmate over here.” He ignores the glares that one inspires. “Wounds are healing, vitals are stable, adrenaline and cortisol levels returned to, ah… fairly normal fluctuations.”

That one takes a minute, and then Steve’s straightening in his chair, murmuring a low, warning, “Tony…”

He doesn’t take his eyes off Bucky as he responds. “You’re insane if you think you haven’t been under every conceivable measure of surveillance since the minute you were carried off the quinjet,” he says quietly, bluntly. “Hell, some measures I didn’t even know we had the capacity for here. I know when you’re nervous. I know when you’re sleeping, when you’re dreaming, and give the technology another couple of years and I could probably tell you what you’re dreaming _about_.”

He’s vaguely aware of Steve muttering something harsh under his breath at that, but Bucky’s suddenly frozen in place, blood rushing in his ears, fighting down the wave of panic and nausea as he recalls sensors and trackers and implants that he dug out of his mechanical arm, dug out of his own flesh, remembers the agonizing scrape of the knife against his ribs as he dug out the last one before finding Romanoff, and wonders when Stark even had the _time_ to insert a whole slew of new ones, and _where,_ and did he just trade out one master for another and –

Fingers snap in front of his face, Steve is speaking louder, harsher, and then the disembodied Irish voice is telling Stark something about stress hormones and –

“Oh, _shit_ , that’s not - Sorry. _Sorry_. Goddammit, okay. Start over. Barnes? You with me here?”

And Steve, quiet next to his ear: “Buck.”

He forces his racing thoughts back to a semblance of present awareness, finds himself gripping the edge of the table, eyes wide, leaning as far away from Stark as the confines of his chair allow. For his part, the eccentric billionaire looks abashed, hands raised in peace or apology. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… Steve hasn’t filled you in on Friday yet, has he?” He shakes his head slowly back and forth. “It’s noninvasive. Remote scans analyzing your brain activity and heartrate and so on. You aren’t… I didn’t… _Jesus…_ Your head’s your own, okay?”

“And the rest of me?”

“Well, that’s kind of the point I’m trying to make. You’ve got a choice here.” Stark leans forward slightly as Bucky relaxes back into his seat. “I’m sticking my neck _way_ out on this one, you understand. Rhodey saw that hardware of yours and would have had you in the CIA’s hands within the hour. After we talked to you, he agreed that the circumstances are… well, I don’t want to say _extenuating_ so much as _bizarre as fuck_ , but he’s got this whole public safety, personal accountability kink, so we settled on some terms. You accept them or you don’t. Accept them, and you can stay; refuse and, well… how was life on the run?”

_Cold_ , he thinks. Confusing. Frightening. Lost. Hungry. Bitter. Pain. Rage. Desperation.

Glances once at Steve and settles on the most honest answer he knows. “Lonely.” Steve makes a low sound in his throat and Bucky shuffles and mumbles, “Terms?”

“An as-yet undetermined period of medical observation and… I don’t want to say _confinement_ exactly, but containment. You’ll be restricted to a floor in the med wing – set up for full self-sufficiency, but anyone you want to see will have to come to you. There will be doctors. There will be therapists in some shape or form, though I think I can safely say that your circumstances are out of the entire _field’s_ depth. There will be twenty-four hour monitoring from Friday in addition to the observation done by the medical team, with full discretion to report to me on anything at all that seems out of the ordinary or alarming. You will agree to, at some unspecified future time, undergo any neuroimaging procedures that might prove useful in understanding just how fucked your head is and maybe, if we’re lucky, start giving us a clue as to whether you’re still susceptible to conditioning triggers and how we might counteract them.”

He’s still digesting all of that when Steve closes his eyes and shakes his head. “Tony, he’s not going to -”

“Sure he will,” Stark cuts him off firmly. “Because he’s far more frightened of what _he’s_ capable of than what anyone else might do to him.”

And Bucky can’t argue with that, finds himself avoiding Steve’s eyes as he reaches over to grip his shoulder. “And if one day I snap, or just decide I’m over it? You really think you can keep me contained if I don’t want to be contained?”

Stark flashes a dangerous smile. “We got a floor designed to hold the Hulk, I think we can manage you, hotshot.” Having read the file on Dr. Bruce Banner, alter-ego alias ‘Hulk,’ Bucky’s pretty sure his strengths, once green, lie more in the _smash_ department than tactical problem solving, but he lets it go.

Steve’s still bristling a bit. “ _Undetermined period_ ,” he echoes. “What does that even mean?”

“It means until no longer deemed necessary.”

“Deemed by _who_?”

Stark throws up a hand in frustration. “Doctors, Cap. Shrinks. Friday. Me. You. _Himself_ , for Christ’s sake.” He glances over at Bucky, who nods slowly. “We good then? Questions?”

He considers a moment, and then says, “Yeah, how do you get the Hulk to the Hulk-proof floor in the first place?” 

Stark stares. “I mean, Banner usually has some sense that…” He trails off, looks at Steve’s wry grin, and shakes his head mournfully. “I should have known you’d be a little shit. C’mon,” he stands abruptly and turns for the door. “Part two of this delightful party takes place in my lab.” 

They’re in the elevator before Steve and Bucky can quite wrap their heads around the sudden shift. “Uh, Tony,” Steve frowns vaguely as he watches the floor numbers pass by as they ascend. “You just got done saying you want to put Buck in quarantine.”

Stark waves him off. “This first. I’ve got you here to keep things under control if everything heads south. And I mean, I’m not going to say don’t save yourself, but, you know, save my work first.”

The door opens and they step out. Bucky has just enough time to be overwhelmed by the size of the place and the eclectic nature of its contents before they’re being steered to one corner of the room where four chairs have been dragged around a cleared worktop. Romanoff sits in one of the chairs, and the tabletop is bare except for two folders – one, much fatter, looks a bit old, a bit worn. The other is thinner, neater, crisp.

Bucky sits opposite Romanoff and next to Steve, who glances across the table and scolds, “Should you be up yet?”

“Nope.”

Stark hovers instead of sitting, places his fingertips lightly atop the thicker file. “This is the file HYDRA kept on you, or at least the version Natasha’s shady KGB contact got ahold of. Natasha and Steve read this two years ago, she passed it to you last year, and I read it yesterday. This,” he moves his hand to tap at the other folder, “is what we’ve so far found that this Brock Rumlow guy had on you. Likely recovered from data deep-sixed by Alexander Pierce, but I doubt we’ll ever know for sure. _This_ ,” he leans in and catches Bucky’s eyes intently, “is what came with you when you were delivered into Pierce’s hands for the Fury op after the mission aboard the _Lemurian Star_.”

Bucky swallows thickly at that, hand clenching unconsciously under the table.

“I don’t want you to read it yet,” Stark continues bluntly. “It’s chock-full of protocols and code phrases.” And Bucky recalls distantly, in the back of his mind, Romanoff asking Rumlow about the _user manual_ , and he supposes Stark’s probably on to something here. “But I’m going to give you the cliff notes, because there’s some stuff in there you’d want to know.”

He finally takes his seat and leans forward, elbows resting on the table. “The D.C. mission was the first time they pulled you out of cold storage since the news broke about finding Cap in the ice. It was also meant to be your _last_ mission; there was a strong recommendation that you be exterminated upon its completion.”

Romanoff doesn’t so much as blink, and he supposes she’s already perused it. Steve jerks in surprise though. “I don’t understand. _Why_?”

It’s Romanoff who answers. “Because they knew an op against Fury was liable to put him in _your_ path. It wasn’t that they feared you’d kill him, so much as they knew that you _wouldn’t._ They knew that he wouldn’t be salvageable as an _asset_ after such an encounter, even if he killed you. _Especially_ if he killed you, maybe.”

“The process of wiping your memory of each mission after its completion,” Stark picks up, “was about more than keeping you from undermining your status as a weapon by establishing a new identity; it was largely to prevent you from holding on to connections that might eventually remind you of your _old_ one. There’s not much in the way of details, but it does note that it was established early on that you experienced heightened levels of volatility and insubordination during trials where details in your surroundings could be traced back to reminders of your life as Bucky Barnes. So they had to be choosy sometimes. And once Cap turned back up, with S.H.I.E.L.D. already well on its way to being completely undermined by HYDRA? They knew it was a matter of time.”

And Bucky remembers the confusion paralyzing him during what was supposed to be a debriefing with Pierce. Pierce had seemed resigned but unsurprised. _Wipe him and start over_. “They had to do it in the middle of the D.C. op,” he recalls faintly, speaking down to the table. _The man on the bridge – who was he?_ “They needed me to stop him. To stop Steve.” _But I_ knew _him._ “And I… I just wanted to remember.”

“But they usually wiped you right before putting you back in cryo, per Natasha’s file,” Stark muses. “Hard to say, considering we had no idea the technology existed, let alone that HYDRA… well, anyway. But it’s likely that the cryo freeze period helped reinforce the memory erasure.”

Bucky knows that to be true, but can’t really say _how_. Just one of the things that had been ingrained in him, just like sitting down in the chair and letting the restraints buckle over his arms and opening his mouth for the bite-guard. Stepping into the cryo chamber of his own goddamn free will.

“Now, knowing all of that – Friday, hook me up here – here’s _my_ file on you.” He claps his hands together and then spreads them out, and a projection emits from a port on the tabletop. Stark stands and manipulates the digital image with practiced hands, skimming through until he finds the piece of it he wants, which he blows up into a recognizable shape above their heads.

It’s a map.

There are blinking dots spread across the world, in red, orange, and yellow, dozens of them. Stark taps a red one hovering over Washington, D.C. and the map shrinks, a data entry expanding in its place.

_Fury, Nicholas J. 3 September 2014. (survived)_

He skims a few lines of text beneath. The address – Steve’s address – where he’d shot the man three times through a wall, scant ballistics details. A note that Steve’s description and Romanoff’s corroboration had identified the shooter.

Stark’s made a goddamn map of his kills.

Romanoff is impassive, Steve looks a bit green; bile is rising in his own throat but then he remembers he _wanted_ this, wanted the whole, awful picture, and –

“Not so fast, buddy.” Stark must see the rising anxiety in his eyes, and he closes the notes on Fury’s shooting and the map reverts to its former size. “This isn’t a cut-and-dry list of the shit HYDRA put you up to. Natasha’s right. There’s no way in hell such a thing exists. However -” he slides the image a bit, centers it around the tightest cluster of markers, spreading from eastern Europe and south into southwest Asia and into the Middle East. “We can make some intelligent guesses from what we’ve parsed out in the last two years of HYDRA’s involvement in global affairs during the past seven decades, plus eyewitness accounts, and ballistics records, so on. Red markers,” he gestures vaguely, and there aren’t all that many comparatively, “are kills you’re rumored to have had a hand in, and it’s likely to be the truth.”

“And the orange and yellow?”

“Orange are incidents where the Winter Soldier _myth_ has been repeated but there’s no evidence to back it up one way or another. Yellow are speculated but unlikely. For whatever reason. Timing, method, conflicting claims, and, now, what we’ve learned from Rumlow’s information. Knowing there are some places they probably wouldn’t have dared send you.”

And casually, he rotates the map back so North America is facing Bucky and Steve. He doesn’t draw attention to it, doesn’t pay the projection any more mind as he sits down beside Romanoff again, but Bucky knows he’s waiting for him to notice the one marker in particular before vanishing the image.

He stares for a long time at the yellow mark flashing overtop Long Island before nodding stiltedly, and Stark disappears the map with a wave of his hand. “Natasha’s right,” he repeats after a minute of heavy silence. “We’re never going to know what you’ve done. The repeated memory wipes, the cryo… I’d be surprised if those memories ever return in more than just the snippets of detail you’ve recovered in the past two years. And you’re going to have to find a way to live with that. The not knowing.”

Deep down, he’s known that for a long time. Hearing it come from Stark’s mouth doesn’t make it any easier, but the firm certainty of his tone eases a weight in Bucky’s chest, however incrementally.

“Tony,” Steve’s frowning down at the two folders, then up at the spot where the map disappeared a minute prior, “How in the world did you put all this together so fast? Even with Friday’s help…”

Stark snorts a laugh. “Fast? I’ve been working on this for _months_ , Capsicle, while searching for a file that was right under my nose the whole time,” he taps the big folder again.

Steve opens his mouth to reply, but Bucky beats him to it. “You knew who I was. It wasn’t because Romanoff told you.”

“No,” Romanoff speaks up again from where she’s been watching the proceedings quietly, “but he confirmed it with me right before they put me under.”

“But _how_?” Steve is dumbstruck. “How could you know?”

“Besides that my father was the ultimate Howling Commandos groupie?” Stark smiles faintly. “Here’s the thing, Cap – everyone knows Peggy Carter was your _best girl_ and all, for the short time you knew her; and they all _forget_ that I’ve known her my whole life. Granted, I thought she was more of a consultant and less a co-founder of a super-secret-spy organization, but, well, details.”

“But I never told her anything about… this.” Stark shifts a pointed stare towards Bucky, and Steve turns a slack-jawed look his way, too. “You saw Peggy?”

“It was something of a brilliant maneuver, in its way,” Stark commends shrewdly. “Because she does often get a bit stuck in the war days. Who would blink twice, even if she _does_ remember seeing him?”

Mouth suddenly dry, Bucky remembers all too well. Just once, only a couple weeks before catching wind of Rumlow’s activity and their subsequent fight, his encounter with Romanoff in Wilson’s townhouse. Hadn’t planned on lingering, hadn’t even planned on talking to her, but he’d watched Steve walk into the hospital the day before and, unable to bring himself to face Steve, found himself seeking out this one other person they could trace back to an old life, ripped away so brutally from them both.

Just a glimpse, an image to compare with the fuzzy ones seeping back into his head, something to prove the passage of time and ground him in the reality of the present. But she’d glanced up with sharp eyes and spoken, no-nonsense.

_“Sergeant Barnes. Did you need something?”_

He’d frozen, but been unable to resist.

_“Steve. I just wondered… is Steve okay?”_

And in her confused jumbling of timelines: _“He’s sad, James. He misses you, you know.”_

_“I hurt him, ma’am. Badly. I think… I might have hurt Howard, too. I can’t… he hasn’t given up looking, but I’m not ready to face him just yet.”_

God only knew what she’d retained of that and relayed in turn to Stark.

“Well,” Stark continues softly, “I’d taken an interest in the _Winter Soldier_ fiasco, just like everyone else. And was more than a little curious at Cap downplaying the whole thing after getting out of the hospital, while having Wilson not-so-discreetly digging into the myths. Did some cursory research of my own. And then got _really_ curious when Fury and Hill blew off my suggestion that we put some resources into tracking you down. This project, I started after the war-era medical research base in Austria turned up all torn to pieces, when I realized that at some level, we were dealing with something more, something much _weirder_ , than just a notorious, ruthless legend of an assassin. And then wondered if Cap had some vested interest in the world thinking him dead, some compelling reason that would even keep Fury off his back. About three days after talking to Peg, I had the absurd revelation that all the pieces fit together somehow.

“In short,” he claps his hands together with an air of finality, clearly done with the somber tone of his day thus far, “I’m a genius.”

 

 

Steve doesn’t let Stark off quite that easily, follows him when he shuffles his way over to the other side of the expansive lab and stands in close, speaking quietly for a long while. Bucky can’t make out the words, but he suspects Steve is trying to relay all of those things that are simply too much for himself right now. The gratitude. The relief.

It’s not lost on Bucky that he owes a debt to Tony Stark that he’ll never be able to repay. The conscious decision not to run had come with the keen understanding of how it all could end. At best, thrown in a hole and living out his days as a lab animal while scientists tried to break down just how HYDRA had accomplished all that had been done to him.

At worst, delivered back into HYDRA’s hands by some lingering insider. And they’d never have been merciful enough to just kill him, after everything. Would want to extract the worst sort of vengeance by stripping away every ounce of humanity he’d reclaimed for himself in the past two years.

And Rumlow as good as said that the only thing left they wanted of him was to see if they could get him to finally rid them of the nuisance that was Steve.

Steve was surprised at his easy acceptance of Stark’s terms – but Steve hadn’t been there when Rumlow found just the right words.

“Hey.” He blinks up and finds Romanoff studying him intently, wonders how long he’s been lost in his own head. “You okay?”

“Just… processing.”

“Hm.” She turns away, and he thinks she’ll get up, give him some space with his thoughts, but then she turns back abruptly and catches his hooded stare again. “Tony likes to hear himself talk. He likes to show off. If you hadn’t noticed. You got what he was saying with all of that though, right?”

He blinks, taken aback. What he was _saying_? About his scrambled head, about the chaos he’d caused over the years, about –

“Bucky.” His eyes dart back. “He was saying that there’s been a piece of you fighting this whole time. Waiting for something to crack through all the layers of bullshit HYDRA planted and give you an opening to claw your way free. That’s why D.C. was going to be the last. They knew Steve would give you that opening; they just never dreamed how effectively he would shatter it all.” 

He swallows thickly.

“The, ah. The code Rumlow used,” she continues softly, eyes tracking Steve and Stark on the other side of the lab; so her words are for him and him alone, then, at least as alone as he can ever be in this place. “It was an emergency, full-stop measure. Something to wrangle you if you went so off the reservation mid-mission that you couldn’t be trusted to comply with orders. They knew. They tried to be prepared. But you fought too hard.”

He didn’t though, he thinks, as he looks at her stoic face, skin still pale after her injuries, probably some pain she was too adept to broadcast. Realizing what Rumlow planned, he’d stopped fighting completely. Had given up in that split second of despair, desperate only to end it before being trapped back in the dark cage of his own mind while twisted psychopaths used his body to their own ends.

There’s something faintly apologetic behind Romanoff’s gaze, but he knows she’ll never apologize for not doing it; and he thinks that maybe she’s shocked herself, in finding that she was unable, when it came down to it.

“I… I didn’t tell Steve -”

“I didn’t either,” she cuts him off, and that’s that, and he knows that this will be something that exists between them and no one else. Her assurance at Wilson’s that she’d do what needs doing; him _begging_ her to when faced with the jaws of hell and being simply too exhausted to keep up the fight.

Steve doesn’t need to know. It would do that thing to him, where his mouth twists and his eyes tighten, and indistinct, distressed sounds deep in his throat cause Bucky’s gut to twist in turn. He doesn’t need to know. It doesn’t matter now. One last secret shared between Romanoff and himself.

And perhaps most surprisingly of all – he realizes he trusts her with it. She held out hope in him when he had none left to spare for himself. She’s been where he is. And neither of them are ever going back.

 

X---X

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks for reading, and for the kudos and comments. Hopefully things were tied up to everyone's satisfaction. It definitely got a bit more in-depth than I'd intended at the start, but it was a joy to write. 
> 
> Also, when I realized this was going to end up at the tower, and incorporating Tony's role in the resolution (which was an excellent decision, me, because I fucking love writing Tony), I somewhat unintentionally crafted this in such a way that Getting Sexually Frustrated Super Soldiers Laid could essentially serve as a Tony crackfic Steve/Bucky postscript. I'm not going to officially link them in a series, but go check it out if you haven't yet. ;-)

**Author's Note:**

> This seems to be the obligatory spot to tell readers to come hang out with me on Tumblr, but I'm not going to pretend that I have the slightest fucking clue what I'm doing on Tumblr besides dying a little more inside every day over Civil War posts, so.


End file.
